Homonyms don’t make good technical terms — A trie is a subtype of the tree data structure that is helpful for indexing strings. But how to pronounce something spelled “trie” ? The phonetics of “trie” are an abject quagmire. By remaining fully-ambiguated in normal conversation, the more pedantic among us can subtly test whether the listener understands…

Acquire options at negative cost — I’ll wind a circuitous — possibly tortuous — path toward understanding margin of safety from a different angle than is typically discussed. Some basics A transaction is an exchange of one thing for another between two parties. A contract is an agreement between parties made in order to facilitate some transaction. Let’s…

7 Big Exam topics — I took and passed the Google Cloud Architect certification exam today for the third time. This test was similar to my previous two takes (in 2021, and 2019) with a few changes in service naming and emphasis, and it reflects some new features that have been added over the years…

And history suggests that it won’t last — The 1990s were a chaotic and exciting period in computing history. Not only was the World Wide Web finally emerging from the lab, but also PCs were becoming more useful outside the workplace. To bring order to the chaos, Microsoft and Intel forged the “Wintel” partnership, which provided a common…

A brief discussion on NVDA’s valuation — Nvidia earnings were pretty good today. But for a company now valued at nearly a trillion dollars, pretty good is no longer enough. Stock in a company is a claim on free cash generated by that company over its life. As of this writing, Nvidia needs to generate $950 billion…

It’s easier than it looks Dataflow custom containers are awesome. As an example, custom containers enables geobeam to pre-install GDAL, PROJ, and other system dependencies onto dataflow workers to process spatial data at scale. …

Market-making only works well for fungible goods with symmetric information — Don’t blame the algorithm It’s been the promise of the past two decades that Big Data will supercharge business decision-making and liberate the CEO from having to rely on superstition and voodoo and actual business experience to make important decisions. Collect everything and save it for a day when machines are finally smart enough…

Strategies to streamline your next PCI DSS assessment — My team and I have published a new reference guide on Limiting scope of compliance for PCI environments in Google Cloud. Overview What is PCI DSS? PCI Data Security Standards (DSS) are a set of standards that companies must comply with in order to process credit card transactions on the web. PCI DSS consists of…

How to assess, plan, and migrate — My team and I published a new guide on Building your Google Cloud Foundation in a series of articles on migrating to Google Cloud, where we pose a number of important questions and considerations to take into account when planning your migration. In this blog article, I summarize some of…